


your waves crash down

by rootcellars



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 15:43:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12820749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rootcellars/pseuds/rootcellars
Summary: “I don’t play,” she says suddenly after a pause, looking up at him with blazing eyes and blazing cheeks. “There will be no games when I fight for you.” Ling and Lan Fan grow up together, in three moments.





	your waves crash down

**Author's Note:**

> Old, OLD drabbles, but I'm trying to get back to AO3 so I figured I'd crosspost – previously, on [Tumblr](http://zethia.tumblr.com/post/60555197860/fma-your-waves-crash-down).

_i._

She is even tinier than he is the first time he meets her: huge dark eyes glaring at the world with something a shade short of defensiveness and at him with something that can only be reverence. Her inky hair flops in her face and already she’s flipping kunai with ease between her pudgy fingers.

Ling looks to her and the blades in her hand, and smiles. “Do you want to play?”

“I don’t play,” she says suddenly after a pause, looking up at him with blazing eyes and blazing cheeks. “There will be no games when I fight for you.”

The young lord ponders this for a moment. What a strange thing of a girl, what a strange thing to say. “It’s all right,” he tells her finally, walking up and placing his hand in hers. “I’ll fight with you, I promise.”

She coughs nervously and turns away, and Ling bites his lip in confusion. His new guard trembles; she is anxious and passionate and already looking forward to the coming day. And Ling glances down at her hand, wrapped in glove and metal even now, and wonders if they will ever touch beyond the armor. The metal that rings her knuckles is cold, but like her grandfather, some fire burns white hot in her eyes.

 

_ii._

It’s a spring day, the kind that make the court poets positively tremble in their windowed suites, and Ling is inside, his arms wrapped around his knees, fidgeting with the end of his sash.

“Your first duty is to your people,” says the withered old scholar in front of him, her brocade sleeves catching and twinkling in the light. Ling looks back at Lan Fan in the corner and grins, watching her flare up at a distance. She widens her eyes in mock annoyance and tips her chin towards his teacher, but he can’t miss the pink that blooms in her face.

It’s a typical thing, for him to flash her cheeky smiles and winks when he should be paying attention, and for her to glare and blush and shoo him away.

“My people,” he repeats dully back to the scholar, though it is a distant and slippery thing on his tongue.

The only person he knows well enough to die for, after all, is sitting behind him with a knife at her wrist and a wild flush in her cheeks, and Ling doesn’t even need to look back to know her eyes are set on him.

 

_iii._

“But why, when I’ll always be there to protect you?” is the first thing Lan Fan says when he suggests fighting back-to-back. “You shouldn’t risk yourself like that.”

But Ling knows his way around a sword, and he’s sparred enough times with Lan Fan that he knows his way around her, too: all steady blocks and smooth turns; Lan Fan can be tricky when she wants but she’s fast enough that she doesn’t have to be. There is raw power and grace in the way she fights and Ling doesn’t even try to hide his admiration.

Still she acquiesces, after a convincing tirade from Fu, and so the next time they meet in the training room they’re standing shoulder to shoulder, and if Ling twists his head around, he can just see the pale and perfect curve of her neck, tensed in anticipation.

They’re both breathing too hard by the time they break and a ragged scrape from a practice sword will leave a nasty bruise on Ling’s hip, but he takes a moment to breathe and tells himself: it will be worth it. If he can guard Lan Fan as well as she guards him, it will be worth it.

And there’s a strange sort of synergy between them as they fight, never facing the other but learning how to move without looking: a turn there, a step here. She advances, he retreats; he anticipates the motion in the twist of her hips and the shift of her shoulders, and steps back almost as soon as she lunges.

Her cheeks aren’t ruddy just from exertion, his heart can’t be pounding this hard just from the exercise. This companionship, thinks Ling, this ridiculous warmth—more than anything else, this has to be worth it.


End file.
